Retailers: GDSN Changes - the productivity killer?

Lately I talked to one of the bigger european retailers who has recently fully adopted the GDSN processes to receive item data from his suppliers.

Meaningless changes!?

He was complaining that they were receiving so many changes and that he needed more staff to get control of this stream of changes although he thought that most of those changes were not meaningful to them!?

How can a change of an item from a supplier be not meaningful to a retailer? At first sight I really questioned this statement and we started investigating what was happening.

First of all I sat down for a couple of days with the data stewarts who are in charge to approve all changes to really see what was happening.

50 - 1,000 changes / day

My first observation was that they really had to approve a huge amount of changed items each day. They had to manage a minimum of 50 changes per day but also one day it was more than 1000 changes which they were not any more able to approve with the existing staff in that day and changes began to pile up.

Up to 10 minutes for approval of a single item

My second observation was that it was quite painful to look at each and every item and to figure out what the change was. Although they have implemented a quite fancy looking comparison screen it takes the data stewart up to 10 minutes to do the item review and to decide whether to synchronize, review or reject the item.

90% of changes meaningless

My third observation then was the eye opener. Approx. 90% of the changes were meaningless for this retailer. How come? Actually every retailer is only using a subset of the attributes which are available in the GDSN. None uses all 1,600 attributes available. All retailers I have seen use between 100 and 250 attributes. But suppliers have to maintain actually the superset of all attributes required by their retail customers.

So what is happening is that supplierA is maintaining Attr1 - Attr200, while retailerB is using Attr1 - Attr100 and retailerC is using Attr90 - Attr200.

If supplierA is changing Attr1 of an item this change gets send automatically to retailerB and retailerC. But it is only relevant for retailerB. retailerC is not using Attr1, so the change is not relevant to him. But according to the GDSN rules he has to synchronize this version of the item to stay synchronized with the supplier. Sending back a CIC review or reject would not make any sense because that is just not what he wants to do.

Solution 1

What is the solution? The first solution approach is to evaluate automatically whether a change is relevant to a retailer and if it is not to automatically synchronize (meaning store the item and send back a CIC synchronized) the item change. Only if the change is relevant put the item into the manual approval workflow.

With this solution this retailer could already save up to 50-60% of the needed effort in his approval process.

Solution 2 - and my recommendation

My recommendation is to take it even one step further. Why do you have to look at each and every item change even if it is relevant to you? Do you really think that your data stewart can judge for all your items whether a slight change in the measurements or in the ingredients or in the packaging or where ever is correct without pulling the concrete product and remeasuring?

My experience is that the whole manual approval process mostly is pure waste of time.

Instead turn the process around. Define rules when an item change cannot be automatically approved (eg. if the description changes, if measurements change more then 10%, etc.). If an item change passes all those rules it should be synchronized automatically. Otherwise you put it to the manual approval process.

And then measure what is your ratio during manual approval between sending a review or reject to the supplier and synchronized. If you have more than 50% getting an immediate synchronized than your approval rules are still to strict and you should further relax them.

Now you should be down to 10% or even less of the original effort.

Btw. dealing with ADD's is typically a little bit more complicated because you typically have a manual enrichment process ...


UPDATE: 
There is a very interesting discussion on LinkedIn regarding this Blogpost, see here.